From CNET: When the Human Genome Project was declared completed in 2003, it had mapped 92% of genes, with the rest remaining a mystery for nearly two decades due to technological limitations. Now scientists have finished sequencing the other 8%, and the human genome has finally been fully sequenced.
Almost 100 scientists from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium collaborated on the project to map the entire human genome. The additional 8% that was sequenced accounts for 400 million new letters added to the existing sequenced DNA -- enough for an entire chromosome, as CNN reported.
The additional genes are very important for adaptation, according to Evan Eichler, one of the major contributors to the main paper on the research and a professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. They include immune response genes enabling humans to adapt to and survive infections, plagues, and viruses, as well as genes that enable human brains to grow larger than those of other primates.
"I've always come back to that point that, to understand genetic variation comprehensively, we need to have a reference that's complete," Eichler said in a press release. "95% of the puzzle being solved is good enough for some people. But I guess for me, getting that last 5% was so important because I believe so much of what we don't understand about disease, or we don't understand about evolution, is disproportionately represented in that 5% of the of the genome that we didn't sequence first off."
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